1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates generally to data access and analysis and, more specifically, to a system and method for parameterizing documents for automatic workflow generation.
2. Description of the Related Art
Financial data can typically be analyzed by users via applications that allow users to create analysis workflows. A workflow usually includes several components, each component generally specifying many parameters. In addition, a particular component can reference another component or a parameter within another component. For example, a first component of a workflow may include a subset of stocks to be analyzed, and a second component may apply a function to the subsets of stocks specified in the first component to generate a parameter within the second component.
After creating a particular workflow, the user often wants to modify one or more parameters of the components included in the workflow and, thereby, generate a new workflow. In existing applications, the user has to re-create the components with the modified parameters and then regenerate the new workflow. Such a solution is not only cumbersome, but is also very time-consuming as re-creating the components often takes a significant amount of time. In addition, such a solution is error prone as the user has to manually re-create the components. Lastly, because several copies of similar workflows are created, such as a solution is also not storage space efficient.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a mechanism for generating new workflows from a current workflow.